Brown, anesthesiologist-statistician, has made fundamental contributions to understanding the neurophysiology of the brain under general anesthesia. He has developed state-space point process algorithms to decode spatial information in ensemble spiking activity of hippocampal place cells, characterize receptive field formation, and control in real-time neural prosthetics and anesthetic states.

Research Interests

Emery N. Brown has developed the state-space point process paradigm to solve neuroscience data analysis challenges: decode how neurons dynamically represent information in their group spiking activity; characterize neural receptive field formation, neural activity during motor learning, and behavioral changes during learning; and develop control systems for neural prosthetics and for anesthesia delivery. Brown co-founded and co-directed the Woods Hole Neuroinformatics summer course and the biannual Carnegie-Mellon Statistical Analysis of Neural Data workshop. He co-authored the neuroscience statistics textbook, Analysis of Neural Data (Springer, 2014). Brown established and leads an interdisciplinary team at MGH, MIT and Boston University which has developed: the first detailed neurophysiological descriptions of anesthetic mechanisms; new strategies for monitoring and controlling the anesthetic states of the brain; and ways to rapidly induce emergence from general anesthesia and sedation. The research is developing personalized, side-effect-free anesthesia care firmly rooted in neuroscience.

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